The U.S. beef industry forms a large part of the nation's food and fiber industry. To facilitate marketing, beef grading standards were developed by the USDA to classify carcasses into quality and yield grades. Beef tenderness is an important quality attribute associated with consumer satisfaction. Presently, the USDA grading system is unable to incorporate a direct measure of tenderness because there is no accurate, rapid, nondestructive method for predicting tenderness available to the beef industry. Thus, beef carcasses are not priced on the basis of actual tenderness, creating a lack of incentives for producers to supply a tender product.